The evolution and future of the global Network university | John Sexton | TEDxNYU

I want to thank all the people here in Abu Dhabi who came reasonably late at night or at least at a time on Saturday night when students would normally be doing something else and I appreciate you being here. I also appreciate the people of New York. who are paying a little bit of attention to this, the people of Shanghai, that the people of all of our study sites as this circulates through the

global

network

of universities, there is a way that, if you just think about uh tedx nyu and what is happening here, I can begin to get an idea of ​​what we call the

global

network

university

.

It's hard for people to understand it at first because it's novel, but I think students here and across the web are living it more and more, even though you may not conceptualize it exactly the way I'm going to conceptualize it tonight. I think you will recognize what I say tonight because you are experiencing it, you feel it and you feel its effect on you, which is what is important. so let's start with what it is not because people tend to, when they look at what is happening at nyu, make an analogy with other things that are clearly different, so it is not a branch campus system, each one is autonomous , isolated and isolated.

You know, when someone goes from a part of, well, let's say from New York to the campus here or the campus in Shanghai or any of the places, it's not like that person is leaving France to go to the French Foreign Legion, so it's not It is a system of branch campuses, it is not a multinational organization that has a presence all over the world, but, essentially, it is connected in a very, very, very loose way, the best phrase I have been able to develop to describe what the

university

of global network is a The organic circulatory system is a single university and just as the energy and elements of life flow through the body, so also the energy of ideas and the human capital of teachers, students and administrators flow through of the global network of universities.

Everyone has an interest. in the health of all the other elements of the global university network each contributes to the identity and well-being of the other elements of the global university network um and and and and none uh could be all that the collective is by itself So, it's a new way of looking at the university, it's based on a worldview, so when people say, "You know why do this, why would I change the university this way?", there's a kind of preached worldview that It has developed with our thinking about this and I would say that there are two parts to that preached view of the world.

The first part is that if you look at the world today more and more, there are nodes of creativity. of talent intellectual activity, what I call developing idea capitals, and you know, there will be various levels of participation as idea capital, there will be a major league, you know, which will be a couple of dozen cities, maybe maybe only a dozen, uh, but you can see that there is this network of idea capitals, cities like new york, abu dhabi and shanghai, and the locations of the study sites, these are idea capitals, uh, and they are every increasingly interconnected.

They are in a network, they are not, they are not independent of each other now for people in universities it is very familiar because universities in some way have always operated beyond sovereignty, ideas have always circulated the great philosophical ideas and math. I know that in all disciplines, on the other hand, universities have always been single-place entities, so in their manifestation, their physical manifestation, even though they were in a world where, even hundreds of years ago, there were capitals of ideas and ideas circulating, the universities were. In one place, this worldview says that the more the leaders of global society, the leaders of global civil society, the leaders of global intellectual society will want to circulate through these capitals of ideas, an analogy that sometimes use is to the Italian Renaissance when if you had sent Leonardo or Michelangelo you can make your art but only if you do it in this place you would lose them because of your place they wanted to circulate between the communities of Milan, Venice and Florence and Rome and throughout Europe and and and and so on successively or another analogy is the silk road this is increasingly the way the world is operating today the second element that is part of the worldview that is behind this is uh it is in some deeper ways and it is that we have ended a century in which the world has become miniature has become small now through the miracle of transportation and communication we are in each other's lives We are interconnected in finance and migration and in all areas of other elements, So what is happening as the world becomes miniature?

Well, how are we going to react to that? Are we going to react to that? As some would say with fear. Because what someone called the clash of civilizations we are going to do, is it going to be fuel? we're gonna let the differences between us tear us apart and and and and uh uh tear us apart maybe literally or we're gonna look at it differently are we gonna look at it differently? Seeing the presence of others who have a different point of view and different experiences and different ways of seeing the world and come with different legacies and cultures.

Let's see that as a great gift in the way that In most places, there was a time when the traveler left and came back and it was the staple entertainment of the town and we wondered and delighted in the stories of difference and sometimes from Of course, there would come tools and, uh, different ways of making art or food, you know which direction the noodles went, who knows, but the point is that there was a delight that arose when we heard the stories , some of which were completely incredible. They were very different from our own experience but of course at the same time this difference was introduced as a separation device and we learned to feel better about ourselves by feeling that others were not as good or perhaps dangerous and and and People who sought power They tried to separate us, so as the world miniaturizes, it becomes a very, very important moment because we will recoil or we will rejoice in the presence of the great diversity of humanity in our lives and the question is: can we build a Community of communities, not just a homogeneous community, not the melting pot that was talked about when I was the age of the students in the room, but a genuine community of communities where we get the wonder and advantage of different traditions. but they intertwine like the great elements of a magnificent clock and form a hole that is greater than the sum of the still identifiable parts, but a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts, so there are these two predicated world views, you already know. that this notion of idea capitalizes on the networks of the world, interrelated ideas that circulate and, increasingly, the humans who carry those ideas want to circulate as Leonardo and Michelangelo did, and then there is the point of importance at least for some . of us to create a world where people welcome difference and seek to connect with it, understand it and incorporate it into their vision of themselves and create a whole that is created in some of the parts of this community of communities, society global civil now.

In the courtyard here in Abu Dhabi about a year ago, my friend, the great political scientist Stephen Holmes, and I were chatting over coffee and he had just finished a semester here and was looking at the accolades from the students. and his colleagues here and then he turned to the global network university and said, "You know, it has happened that traditionally universities, the big ones, have trained leaders for nations, but what is the global network university doing? What is the nyu trying to do? What we do is train leaders for people in global civil society who can help build this community of communities now, how did it come about?

You know, first of all, you know this, this idea, should it? I mean, it flows pretty naturally if you're paying attention because of nyu's DNA and I think that's why the first university is trying it is nyu uh it it it if I'm a good observer and then I'm pretty good at telling the story of what what I notice So I'm going to take you through the notice and narrative type stages of the last 10 years or so, although there are predicate movements that go back a long time. You know, sometimes there's a lot of controversy about whether. you should or should not be in a particular place.

Location Well, it's interesting that NYU's first foray into running a global network university was when the Spanish department decided to open the first study site in 1959 in Generalísimo Franco, Spain. This was not a great place for freedom of thought. You must know it. but there it was and we are still there, that was our first vision, but only for the Spanish majors and then, ten years later, in 1969, we opened in Paris another main program for French magicians and then, as the years went by, uh . In the 1990s under my predecessor, Jay Oliva, who passed away and has remembered him, he passed away this week and we remember him with so much love for his contributions, but it was he who brought in Harold Acton, the great talented Villa La Pietras, so these were the legacy sites that existed as we became in this century, um and I have to say, uh, the university global network 1.0 was very simple, uh, it was just noticing what we were in New York City, notice how galatin's phrase had worked.

For almost 200 years, we should be a university that was inside and outside the city, not a university behind the gates. You know, we almost felt like a responsibility to not have a wonderful campus with blades of grass that you could. you know under the sun and you could walk through those doors like you do on the wonderful Columbia campus in New York and you move around and you could be anywhere it's Shangri-la and we felt, until relatively recently, that that was like that it was a responsibility, you know, we longed for a campus and suddenly we said wait a minute, maybe it's a completely different way of turning this picture 180 degrees for certain types of people and it was Gallant's line that we were going to be a university in and of the city that that it sort of catalyzed that but then in and what city and this is where our location envelope came into play here we were in Greenwich Village, which is a, you know, a booyah base of human activity and and uh uh it just just bubbled with all kinds of ideas and manifestations of humanity and then we realized that New York City was the first city in the world that could say that if someone came to New York, no matter where they were from in the world, that they came to , they would have a neighborhood in every country in the world.

It turned out that every country in the world was represented in the New York City public school system by children who were born in that country, not by descendants of that country's 40 percent of New York City citizens. Today they were born in other countries and if you want to hear the prayers or the music or the language or try the food of any country in the world you can go to a neighborhood in New York City, yes, then it wasn't Disney or Epcot City, you know, but , but, the real people, many of them were born in places in all the countries of the world, in one city, and the interesting thing is that they call themselves New Yorkers, no.

It matters once they come they call themselves New Yorkers I'm not saying New York is perfect I'm not saying we've hit the high note yet but what I'm saying is that in New York there was a perfect laboratory to try to create a community of communities and we began very consciously to try to join the faculty students and staff who cared about that, I mean, no one comes to nyu who can't stand the cacophony and complexity, in fact, those of us who come to nyu They are kind. For example, it brings the cacophony and the complexity, you know, try to confuse me with this or we come very timidly, maybe from small towns and say, teach me, so this is where I started listening to students, for example. at my dinners of students who, unlike their high school classmates who had gone to closed universities, perhaps eliminated closed universities, felt that when they finished they not only had the excellent education that you get from a medallion university with leading departments, but that They also had a disciplinary education. but they had a second major, you know, we have this great phrase that we use about the global network of universities today, make the world your major, well, you get your physics, or you get your history, or you get your art, so you get whatever is traditional.

The specialization is the best thing you can get at NYU because we are the best professors in the world doing that, but in addition to the fact that you get this education to be a cosmopolitan and to be a member of global civil society, the world is your specialty and 1.0 was just Thinking we could do that with New York, wow, get on a bus, go to the districts, so we started doing that and then 2.0 was eliminating the study sites and the first Madrid was available to all students , not only forspanish students, and then paris became available to all students and not just spanish students and in florence we started building and and and we have more and more students there not only interested in art history but in general and then london, prague and berlin and then we said wait a minute not everything can be europe and we opened a study site and okra and buenos aires and shanghai opened as a study site and tel aviv and sydney and now the students were and each one had a personality in prague transitional government and music in florence of course art and global public of accra health, development economics and now early childhood education, like this, like this, and then the schools started to look at this and say: wait a minute, There's a curricular push here, so think about being a college student in business and you get stern. in new york, but you can do five semesters in new york and one in london and one in shanghai and one in buenos aires or think of it as a major in film or whatever, so this was where studying the paths became much more robust and that got us to 3.0 because we looked at this picture of the world around 2005 2006 and we said how could we claim to be this university that embraces all of humanity and creates a community of communities and not being in the arable Muslim world, so that, of course, the first reaction of some who forgot about the Franco generalissimo was, well, how could you do that?

But you know that at nyu we are not afraid, as our attitude endowment complements our location endowment, so we are not afraid and we understand that the innovators you know can fail. Mavericks may fail, but there are great rewards if you go somewhere no one else has gone. And we started searching with the help of a group of teachers in various parts of the world. of the urban muslim world and over and over and over and over again I heard about abu dhabi and how special the leadership was and what a special place it was uh, frankly, it wasn't as bad as some in nyu who referred to it as abu dubai, but almost demonstrating the need for the program, but I didn't know much, but I did with my colleagues a lot of due diligence and finally came the presentation of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed and that was, I think, under his vision that It was such a turning point time in the history of higher education because he was the one who said, sure, if you want to study far away, that's fine, but what if you do something much greater?

Would you consider opening a second door where students are literally standing around? the world and this is something very important to understand about Abu Dhabi. I was not saying that I wanted Nyu Abu Dhabi's mission to be the education of Emirati citizens only. He said I want to educate global civil society leaders. It is important that they are the most educated people in the world. It is important that they come from all sectors of society, not just those currently privileged. So what would you think, John, about going out and finding talent wherever it is, in the tribal villages or in the hallways? of privilege and bringing together a cosmopolitan group.

I don't know, some of you listening to this may not know that the current student body at nyu abu dhabi is approximately 600 students. 108 countries represented. The largest group is the American group with 15. percent and this was the vision of mohammed bin zayed, he said that these people will come together, of course, they will understand abu dhabi in a way that we hope they will carry love in their hearts forever and Believe me those of us who have been Here I see the wonder of it is not that Abu Dhabi is perfect, it has weaknesses, just like New York, like all cities, but we understand Abu Dhabi in a way we would never understand it if we weren't here and We will carry that understanding with us, so yes, that is good and yes, we work hard to try to reciprocate the generosity of the Emirates towards us by helping to elevate education here in every way we can and we are proud that around 10 of our student bodies are Emiratis by merit by merit, but that opened the second door which was 3.0 and then when the first class, the class, this wonderful class of pioneers who took risks, shouted and I were talking and laughing about how, when, when we first arrived.

I met her, she's about to graduate nobody, nobody, nobody, could promise anything, well, promises, yes, but I could be sure that the promises would be real and here we are talking about yes, you know, should I go to college from Yale Law School or Columbia Law School or Nyu or? Should I do this PhD program or that PhD program or, you know, three members of the graduating class go to Rhodes College in Oxford? I mean, this is extraordinary, but what's most extraordinary is the community of communities that developed and the Chinese government saw that. and they came to us and said: how about we open a third door?

How about we take your studio site in Shanghai and allow us to partner with you in the same way that the Emirates government partnered with you and that was the genesis of Nyu Shanghai? which opened last year i was with the freshman there just a month ago and nyu shanghai is different from nyu abu dhabi in that half the class is chinese and the other half is from outside china, the same way as The students are here in Abu Dhabi. and in new york, but chinese students are great, i mean there are 12 million high school graduates every year in china and you have to be in the top 60,000 for us to even consider you for nyu shanghai for class to start It was a great start, we just finished admission for the second generation so we leave a 4.0 global network university if you are a young person sitting on any continent and thinking about going to university and want to have a research university. education in one of the best universities in the world with the best professors.

You can see nyu. The first thing you have to decide about nyu is which door I am going to enter through and it makes a difference if you enter through the New York door. It's their cacophony. massive cacophony, it's huge, you meet over 40,000 students and if you want to get lost, you can get lost, you know, if you come as a Chinese student, you want to stay with just Chinese students, you could because there are a couple thousand of them there. You know it would be a sin, but you could, but in this massive cacophony where it's hard to build a community, but when you learn the skills to do it through scouting floors and student activities, etc., it's wonderful when you do. reward when that intertwining starts to happen right there on that campus because it's the end, of course, it's in that city that miniaturizes the world, but it's an American city and even though up to 25 percent of the incoming class has foreign passports 75 are Americans if you don't like Americans you shouldn't go to nyu new york now the other end of the spectrum is nyu abu dhabi now by 2020 nyu abu dhabi will have 2000 undergraduates and a thousand graduates it is a full research university The amount of research that going on here is extraordinary, both in extent and depth, the students are completely involved, but you shouldn't come to nyu abu dhabi, where where the largest contingent is 15, there is no student body like this anywhere Place of the world.

It is concentrated cosmopolitanism distilled. If you don't like people different from you, don't come to Nyu Abdullah because you can't avoid anyone and you can't hide and you can't hide from your teachers and you. We are in a city that also does not have that kind of dominant center of gravity where 15 only 15 1 5 of the population of the emirates are citizens, but of course it is a welcoming Arab, Muslim and Bedouin tradition. He said it's the other end of the spectrum and then of course in the middle you have nyu shanghai, okay nyu shanghai, where half the class is Chinese, so you better not go if you don't like Chinese, because If you are not a Chinese student, you will have a roommate who is Chinese and vice versa and it is a Chinese city, a big Chinese city, but it will also be small like Nyu Abu Dhabi, by 2020 there will be 2,000 undergraduate students and a thousand graduate students. and again a research university, but no matter which door you enter, no matter which door you went to, it is an organic circular circulatory system, so at least two of your semesters, two full semesters at least and the January quarters are happen in other parts of the system. and not just in the three doors that we call portals, but in the 12 white study sites that I mentioned before and you get there and the students enter from each of the three portals, so for 2020 what I imagine is the

future

, uh.

What happens is you know you're going to have these three entry campuses, one with about 40 thousand students, one with about three thousand students, one with about three thousand students, so let's say round numbers, fifty thousand students, and at any given time , there will probably be between sixty and sixty-five percent. in New York and that's students and the ratio of teachers and administrators, etc., you know, 10 to 12 percent will be in Abu Dhabi and 10 to 12 will be in Shanghai and about 15 to 20 percent will be in the diverse studies. websites and they will all circulate together in a global community of communities which, when you look at it, my friends, it comes back to where I started, it's really just New York in general, but the fact is that there are highly talented people, not all , but a disproportionate share of the most talented and creative people in the world and, certainly, a disproportionate share of the people who are going to be the leaders of global civil society and who don't want to be told that if they want a college education at all. highest level, you have to spend seven of your eight semesters at least in this small town, sometimes somewhere in the forest, and then use all your electives to go study for a semester, which is nothing more than cultural tourism There's going to be a high degree of people who really want a high-quality integrated education in the world of cosmopolitanism, so I'm going to close with a story that another university president told me after spending some time recently at the University.

From New York, John said, I want you to imagine a snack between the leader of Oxford and the leader of Cambridge in the year 1900 and at the top one says to the other, what is this place at Harvard? By bringing the German research model to universities and mixing all of this, do you really think you will one day be considered our equals? And this observer of the higher education scene said that in 25 years people will say what happened in the past. there that changed to the larger universities, the ones that can magnetize the most talented students and faculty staff, what happened to change it to these organic circulatory systems, not a hub and spoke branch campus system, a circulatory system organic, and if we continue on this course, if the The talent that is in this room and in New York and in all the other places that are going to see this continues to demonstrate that very talented people understand this.

I think Nyu is going to do something special, that's why he's worth my life. Thank you very much to all. a lot of you